The most preposterous proposal ...

Subject:	The most preposterous proposal ...
Date:	Mon, 8 Feb 2010 05:25:32 -0800 (PST)

http://dnghu.org/

Perhaps you have heard of it. A Spanish guy (who apparently gets some
sort of government funding) advocates what he calls Modern Indo-
European as an international language. Form seeing his conversations
it doesn't seem he is tolerant for criticism of his proposal.

It is a quite laughable idea, and hard to know where to start in
criticism of it. It is _for practical purposes_ a constructed,
artificial language if it is actually used, as it has no history. That
it is a reconstruction may be linguistically relevant, but I don't see
the practical use of it. The grammatical complexity of it, though, is
relevant - the experience of Esperanto and such shows that it
definitely is easier to start using a language with a simple grammar,
while that of PIE is about the most complex and irregular possible.
That's why the long-term trend in all branches of IE is toward
simplification and regularisation of grammar, while it is not so in
many other language families.

Now his PIE is supposely that of 'European' PIE, that is, the last
common ancestor of Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Balto-Slavic, which
he alleges to have been spoken as late as 2000 BC, in Europe. I'm not
going to criticise his reconstruction, because it is not necessary.
The point is that those languages, so far as they are used to talk
about modern things, all have already an extensive vocabulary in
common - which has nothing to do with PIE.

I am rather speaking of Latin, of course. Indeed, on all counts, Latin
is a superior international language to his PIE. It already has an
extensive history of being used to talk about all subjects; its
grammar, while complex, is less so than any reasonable PIE would be;
it has an already-existing literature and needs no such promotion. The
only criticism one could make against Latin is that it has a history
of elitism; but even if that is a strike against it, it is but a minor
one.

Esperanto also is clearly superior to PIE as a constructed language;
it is designed to be, and in fact is, substantially easier to learn
than any natural language, and has a large number of speakers and
history of use.

Of course, this is all academic as we know that English will be the
interlanguage of the foreseeable future, but that only makes it a more
laughable idea. If this were created for personal fulfillment, it
would be fine, but when it's being seriously promoted as the
international language, someone has a screw loose.

Andrew Usher